“Then I’d have to say no,” I said.
“And did you examine your research subject, the one you stabbed in the back, for evidence of scoliosis?”
I felt my cheeks flush. “No,” I said. “He appeared to be a normal individual. He was a marathon runner. I don’t imagine someone with scoliosis would have an easy time running marathons.”
“You ever see photos or news stories about amputees, wearing artificial limbs, running marathons?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Do you imagine they have an easy time doing it?”
“No, I don’t. I’m not sure I understand what you’re getting at, though.”
“What I’m getting at, Dr. Brockton, is this: You don’t actually know for a fact that Billy Ray Ledbetter’s spine was normal, and you don’t know for a fact that your research subject’s spine was identical in shape to Mr. Ledbetter’s. What I’m getting at is the fact that a knife could have followed a different path in Mr. Ledbetter’s body than in the body of your experimental cadaver if their spines were curved differently. Couldn’t it, Dr. Brockton?”
I was not willing to back down completely. “Slightly,” I said. “If one of them had severe curvature and the other did not. But neither of them had severe curvature.”
“You’ve just said you didn’t measure or X-ray either spine for scoliosis,” he shot back.
“I haven’t measured or X-rayed your spine, either,” I said, “but that doesn’t keep me from noticing that you probably have some anterior deterioration and compression in your cervical disks. That’s why your head juts slightly forward of your shoulders. Do you have neck pain? You might be a good candidate for cervical fusion.”
“We are not here to talk about my spine, sir,” he all but shouted at me.
“No, sir, we’re not,” I said levelly. “What we’re here to talk about is truth and competence, and what I’m getting at is that after studying thousands of skeletons, I don’t have to take X-rays and measure angles to notice a deformed spine. Neither of these two individuals had a deformed spine.”
He sputtered a bit, and tried to regain his advantage, but he had clearly played his one trump card, and it wasn’t quite the ace he’d hoped it would be. After a little more sparring, the physician who was leading the hearing called a halt, thanked me, and pronounced me free to go.
As I left the hearing room, I noticed Hamilton’s attorney rubbing his neck; the sight made me smile. Then I caught the stenographer looking from me to the attorney and back again. She gave me a wink and a smile; she crossed her legs at the same time. I wasn’t sure if that was just a happy coincidence, or if it was some sort of reward for providing a bit of entertainment. Either way, I smiled bigger and returned the wink.
Then I saw Garland Hamilton looking at me. I met his gaze, and he gave me a brief nod. It wasn’t as friendly as his greeting had been, but it was fairly cordial, considering that his professional life was on the line here and I was part of the effort to terminate it.
The state’s lawyer led me out of the hearing room. In the marbled hallway, seated on a bench outside the double doors, was Jess Carter. If I’d given the matter any thought, I’d have realized Jess would be testifying as well, since she had reautopsied the body of Billy Ray Ledbetter before I examined the bones. But I’d been too preoccupied with the Chattanooga case, and with my heavy-handed treatment of my creationist student, to think about it.
“Hey, stranger,” she said. “Fancy seeing you here. You free by any chance to night?”
This was the second question today that had caught me off-balance.
“Well, I could be,” I said, my thoughts lagging half a beat behind my words. “I mean, I am. I think. Are you?”
She laughed at my clumsiness. “Ah. Sorry, no. Some guy in the hospital for routine foot surgery died the night he checked in, and the family’s screaming lawsuit. I gotta get back and do his autopsy this afternoon.”
“Oh. Right. Me too, now that I think about it. I mean, not an autopsy. I have some test papers to grade, so I can give them back tomorrow morning.”
“I thought UT was out on spring break this week?” She raised a quizzical eyebrow at me. Underneath both brows, her eyes were dancing.
Damn. Why did her processor always seem to work so much faster than mine? I was glad it hadn’t been Jess cross-examining me in there just now. “Don’t let me keep you from your testimony,” I said, nodding at the state’s attorney, who was looking anxious.
“Oh, what I have to say won’t take long,” she said. “I’ll just tell them how I took one look at those rotting remains and handed them straight over to the eminent Dr. Brockton.”
She winked, turned, and disappeared through the doorway. In her wake she left a swirl of hair, perfume, and female pheromones. Also an unmistakable aura of wit, intelligence, and professional competence.
CHAPTER 10
I WAS HALFWAY THROUGH a stack of a hundred test papers, and already my stomach was paging me. I checked my watch; it said ten-thirty, which was too early for lunch even by my standards, though not by much. Besides, the nearest cafeteria, in the athletic building across the street, didn’t start serving lunch until eleven. If I stayed focused, I could grade the remaining fifty papers-it was a multiple-choice and fill-in-the-blank test-and still be the first person through the lunch line.
There was a knock at my door. I always kept the door ajar when I was in, and most students just barged right in. Not this time. “Come in,” I said. Miranda leaned her head around the door and scanned the room. “Since when do you knock?” I asked.
“Since I walked in on you kissing someone,” she said, rolling her eyes.
“Ah,” I said, regretting the question. “That was a once-in-a-lifetime lapse. I was overcome with grief at the time. She was just trying to comfort me.” Unfortunately-mortifyingly-“she” was an undergraduate student who had asked a question that had released a flood of sadness over my wife’s death. In trying to console me, the young woman had given me a kiss that began as compassion but swiftly turned to passion. It was probably fortunate that Miranda had appeared in my doorway when she had; otherwise, I might have crossed even farther over the line.
“Comfort, huh,” Miranda snorted. “Hmm. Sort of like that jailer I read about in the News Sentinel last week? The guy caught comforting one of the female prisoners? She was grief-stricken over being arrested for prostitution, if I remember the story right.”
“No,” I said, “not like that. There was no nakedness involved in this comforting.”
“Might’ve been if I’d walked in five minutes later,” she said. “Speaking of the capable and comforting Miss Carmichael, how is she? Still at the top of her class?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “She’s taking two cultural anthropology classes this semester. I hope she hasn’t gone over to the Dark Side.”
“Hmm. I suspect she’ll circle back to physical anthropology. She just seems the physical type, you know?” Miranda smiled sweetly as she said this, to let me know she was joking. Sort of.
“I’m glad to hear you say that,” I said with an answering smile. “I was getting worried about her. You’ve given me such…comfort.”
She glared, then laughed. “Okay, okay, I’m sorry. Truce. I’m not still jealous of her.” She paused for half a beat. “Smart, cute little bitch.” She laughed again. So did I. Miranda had a way of tipping me off-balance, then catching me just before I went sprawling. “Actually, I didn’t come by just to stomp on your feet of clay,” she said.
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. I was so enjoying it. What other delights await me?”
“Our research subject, oh-five thirty-one?” I was instantly alert; 05–31 was the case number we’d assigned to the corpse tied to the tree at the Farm, because he was the thirty-first forensic case of 2005.
“What about him?”
“He’s getting pretty interesting. You might want to come out and take a look.”
“I was planning to h
ead that way after I finished grading these papers and eating lunch,” I said, “but somehow those seem less compelling now. Let’s go.”
The department’s pickup truck was parked a flight of stairs away, near the tunnel that penetrated the stadium at field level, at the north end zone-the tunnel the UT football team ran through to the cheers of a hundred thousand people on game days. The truck was angled nose-first between two of the columns holding up the stadium’s upper deck. I backed around, tucking its rear bumper between two other columns, and threaded the one-lane ser vice road that ringed the base of the stadium, weaving a path around several students and an oncoming maintenance truck.
Turning right onto Neyland Drive, we paralleled the river, driving downstream. The morning was sunny and unseasonably warm for mid-March-at least, what used to pass for unseasonably warm-and there were already a fair number of cyclists and runners on the greenway that bordered Neyland. The School of Agriculture’s trial gardens-a couple of carefully landscaped acres radiating from a large circular arbor-were already ablaze with daffodils, forsythia, and tulips. I slowed to admire the view, which was just as well, because a hundred yards ahead, a truck hauling a long horse trailer was making a leisurely right turn into the entrance of the veterinary school.
“Hey, speaking of horses, what ever happened to Mike Henderson?” asked Miranda. “He was doing research on the effects of fire on bone a while back. Worked at the vet school part-time, and used to burn horse and cow bones to study the fracture patterns, didn’t he? Laying the groundwork for a big project with human bone.”
“Well, that was his plan,” I said. “His M.A. thesis had some problems. He burned a lot of bones, and he got some nice pictures showing the difference between how dry bone and green bone fracture in a fire. But I’m not sure he added much in the way of interpretation or analysis.”
“I saw some of those pictures at a poster session at the forensic conference a year or two ago,” she said. “Really interesting. The dry bones he burned fractured in a sort of rectilinear pattern, like logs in a campfire. But the green bones fractured in a sort of spiraling pattern, right?” I nodded. “How come?”
“Not sure,” I said. “Nobody is. You wanna know my personal theory?”
“Oh yes, please, Doctor,” Miranda whispered huskily. “I love it when you share your personal theories with me.” I’d laid myself wide open to that brickbat of sarcasm.
“Okay, smart-ass, I think it has to do with the collagen,” I said. “There’s still a lot of collagen in fresh bone. I don’t think anybody’s done research that supports this yet, but my theory is, the collagen matrix has a little twist to it. That would make the bone stronger. Sort of like those twisted pine trees you see growing on windy cliff-tops, you know? The spiral grain makes them a lot tougher than the tall, straight trees that grow where the wind doesn’t blow so hard.”
“Nature’s a pretty good structural engineer,” she agreed.
I turned onto the entrance ramp that would carry us up to Alcoa Highway, which spanned the river and led to the medical complex and the Body Farm. “It’s not too late to change your dissertation topic,” I said. “I bet if you took comparative X-rays and MRIs of bones when they were fresh and then after they’d dried, you could shed some light on the structure of the collagen.”
“Sure,” she said. “Just flush all my data on osteoporosis down the toilet and start over.” I nodded. “So when I hit the seven-year mark as a graduate student, can you get me tenure?”
“If it means I get to keep you as a colleague,” I said.
“Ha,” she said. “You’d feel threatened by me if I were a colleague.”
“Ha,” I said. “I feel threatened by you already.” I laughed. “I guess that means I’m either brave or foolish.”
“Guess so,” she said. She didn’t indicate which one her money was on.
As we crossed the bridge over the river, I noticed the water level had risen during the night. Every winter, the Tennessee Valley Authority lowers the levels in its chain of reservoirs so that there’s room to accommodate plenty of runoff during the rainy season. By mid-March, though, the rains tend to taper off, so TVA begins refilling the pools to their normal summertime highs. Some of the lakes up in the mountains-Norris and Fontana, especially-dropped ten or twenty feet in the winter, exposing high layers of red clay banks ringing the green waters. Fort Loudoun, though-as a mainline reservoir that had to be kept open to barge traffic-only dropped about three feet. It was enough to expose shoreline for arrowhead-hunters, but not enough to strand boats on the mud like beached whales.
The redbuds and dogwoods along Alcoa Highway were starting to bloom. Normally the redbuds came first, then-just as they were winding down-the dogwoods burst out. Some years, though, when the botanical planets aligned in some magical way, the two species bloomed in unison, and this was shaping up as one of those glorious years. Maybe it was just because I was finally getting clear of my two-year grieving spell over Kathleen’s death, or maybe because I felt the stirrings of desire for Jess-encouraged by what I took to be flirting on her part-but this spring seemed to reek of wanton, shameless fertility. The air was almost indecent with the scent of blossoms and pollen. It was the sort of spring that had inspired pagan festivals in other cultures, other centuries.
UT’s College of Agriculture had a dairy farm beside the hospital, bounded by a big bend in the river; on a morning like this, with the trees in full flower and the black-and-white Holsteins arranged on the emerald grass, the view was like something out of a painting: Tennessee Pastoral, it might be titled. Tuck the Body Farm into one corner, and it would be like one of those seventeenth-century memento mori paintings featuring a skull or bludgeoned animal nestled among the dewy fruits and vegetables to remind us of our mortality. Sort of like the role I played at UT faculty meetings, I supposed.
I parked beside the entrance and unlocked the padlocks on the chain-link fence and the inner wooden gate. We didn’t have any redbuds or dogwoods inside the Body Farm, but we did have dandelions galore in the clearing, bright splashes of yellow amid the new grass and old bones.
As Miranda and I trudged up the path toward the upper end of the facility, I noticed a new body bag a few feet off the trail, with one hand and one foot exposed. “Is that the highway fatality?”
“Yes,” she said. “We brought him out from the morgue yesterday morning.”
I knelt down beside the body and folded the bag back. As I did, a small squadron of blowflies swarmed up from around and beneath the black plastic. “And he was walking on I-40?”
“Yeah, wandering along that elevated stretch downtown where there’s no shoulder. Stumbled into the traffic lane, and some high school student smacked right into him. I feel sorry for the kid-apparently he’s pretty torn up about it.”
“Be hard not to be,” I said. “I ran over a dog once, and it made me throw up. I can’t imagine accidentally killing a person.”
“He’s lucky he was driving a big SUV. Otherwise, he might’ve been killed, too. The front end was pretty smashed up. Smaller car, this guy might’ve come right over the hood and blown through the windshield at sixty or seventy miles an hour.”
I studied the dead man, who looked to have lived four or five tough de cades before dying in the fast lane. One side of the face and head had been crushed; shards of glass and paint were tangled in the hair, and a number of teeth had snapped off at the gum line. The left arm, shoulder, and ribs appeared shattered as well. I noticed clumps of white fly eggs, which looked like grainy paste or Cream of Wheat, scattered across his many wounds. Twenty-four hours from now, his entire body would be swarming with newly hatched maggots.
“Looks like a coin toss whether he died of brain damage or internal injuries,” I said. “I guess Jess could pin it down, if it mattered.”
“The family said they didn’t want an autopsy, and they didn’t want the body, either,” Miranda said. “He’d been living on the street for a while; problems with drinking an
d probably mental illness. Apparently no love lost between him and his relatives. The death certificate simply lists ‘multiple injuries from automobile impact’ as the cause of death.”
“Well, it’s too bad,” I said, “but he’ll be an interesting addition to the skeletal collection. Good example of massive blunt-force trauma, and how you can tell the direction of impact from the way the bones are fractured.”
“Also a good example of why it’s not a good idea to drink and walk.”
“That too,” I said.
I folded the body bag back over the man, nudged his hand and foot beneath its shade. The shade would keep the skin from turning leathery-tough, as it would in the sunshine; it would also keep the maggots-which shun daylight, and the predatory birds that accompany it-munching busily around the clock. With that, we turned and headed up the path again toward our Chattanooga victim’s stand-in.
As we got close, I saw why Miranda had been eager to bring me out for a look. The body still hung from the tree, its head sagging forward nearly to its chest. Despite the facial injuries I had replicated-bloody injuries that would normally prompt a feeding frenzy by teeming maggots-most of the soft tissue remained. Even the exaggerated eye makeup remained intact. But the body’s feet, ankles, and lower legs had been reduced almost to bare bone.
“Wow,” I said, “he’s looking a lot like the murder victim, except that his abdomen is still bloated. Another couple days, maybe, and I’d say he’ll correspond almost exactly.” I knelt down and checked the feet and legs for signs of carnivore chewing, but I didn’t see any-again, just like the Chattanooga victim. All I saw were maggots, fighting over what little tissue remained on the lower extremities.
We had set an infrared camera on a tripod, aimed at the body; it was rigged to a motion sensor so if a nocturnal animal managed to breach the fence and chew on the body, we’d capture a photo of it. “Have you checked the camera?” Miranda nodded. “Has anything triggered it?”
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